


Half a Soul

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 08:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17240492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Daemon AU. Harold came back, but his daemon didn't. As for Ward ... Danny doesn't knowwhat'sgoing on with Ward, or where (or what) his daemon is.





	1. Danny

**Author's Note:**

> Every fandom needs a daemon AU. Basically a retelling of season 1 with Philip Pullman-style daemons.

It was Vendrida, Danny's Pekingese daemon, who noticed first. Danny kicked himself, later, looking back on it, because he hadn't noticed a thing. But she didn't _tell_ him (it was always hard getting information out of Vendrida, stubborn as she was), and there was just so much going on. He had noticed Vendrida growling at Ward, of course, the first time he walked into Ward and Joy's office after fifteen years; but Ward was trying to have him thrown out of the Rand building by corporate security at the time, and obviously Vendrida wasn't going to take that well.

It quickly became clear that Vendrida _really_ didn't like Ward. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that she hated Ward, although she never tried to attack him; in fact, she seemed a little scared of him, growling at him from behind Danny's legs. Danny didn't remember her dislike of Ward being that acute when they were kids, but she had never really liked him, mostly due to Ward's efforts to sic his daemon, Erythis, on her.

But then, Vendrida had strong opinions on people. It was as if she felt that she needed to make up for Danny generally liking everyone at first glance (he _did_ , though! people were mostly pretty nice!) by injecting a note of caution into the relationship. She held herself back until she felt comfortable with someone. There were only a few people she'd taken to at first sight. One was Colleen. Danny's first glimpse of Colleen was actually because of Vendrida venturing over to cautiously say hello to Colleen's kestrel, something she _never_ did with strangers.

(Danny loved that Vendrida liked Colleen. He wished she'd like more people that he liked.)

But in general, allowing for a certain amount of excessive caution, Vendrida's instincts about people were good ones. If Danny had listened to her, maybe he wouldn't be waking up in the Meachums' secret penthouse after almost dying, with Vendrida curled on his chest and growling like a small engine at a nearby Ward, who was calmly sipping a cup of coffee and glaring at her.

"Do you think you can shut her up for five minutes?" Ward asked.

"You pushed me off a building!"

"That's what you do when you see someone trying to break in."

"Now, boys," came a voice -- a voice Danny had never thought to hear again. Vendrida had been growling at Ward in a sullenly defensive way ( _come any closer to Danny and lose a finger,_ that small growl seemed to say) but at Harold's shocking, impossible arrival, all the fur on her spine went up, and she began to leap forward, a lunge that Danny knew all too well.

Danny caught her, held her, soothed her, and she flattened into his lap, ears clamped tight to her skull.

"Is that Vendrida? It's a pretty little thing she settled as," Harold remarked, and Danny felt something in him bristle too; you didn't talk about other people's daemons that way, you just _didn't_.

He wanted to be glad Harold had come back. He wanted to feel as if he had family around him again. But looking at Harold, all he could think was that something was missing, and he understood what it was when he got up and went to greet his almost-father, the other half of his lost family.

Harold should have had Duchess, his mastiff, trotting at his heels as always. Danny couldn't quite bring himself to ask, but he still kept looking, expecting to see her, expecting to see some sign of Harold looking for her.

But of Duchess, there was no trace. It was as if she'd never existed. And it made Danny realize what else he hadn't seen, made him think about the way Vendrida cowered and growled when Ward came near.

 

***

 

"Joy," Danny said, some time later in the apartment the Meachums had set him up with, as he tried to find his way back to some kind of normalcy, some approximation of how things used to be for him, for them. "Joy ... where's Erythis?"

"Ward's daemon?" Joy asked, surprised. She was casually stroking Kairon as she sat on the couch, with the serval draped loosely over her lap. "Well ... with Ward, I guess. Wherever he is. Why on Earth do you want to know?"

"Are you sure?"

"What do you mean? Of course I'm sure. Erythis settled as something small, a mouse or something like that, I think. It was after you were gone -- during the days after Dad died. Both our daemons settled then. I think Ward was embarrassed that she settled so small. He used to try to force her to change into the biggest, fiercest things he could think of, back when we were kids -- do you remember that?"

"Yeah," Danny said, and from beside him, nestled among the couch cushions, Vendrida's body vibrated with a tiny growl. _She_ remembered, certainly, the way Ward used to goad and push his daemon into changing to something large enough to harass her. Erythis usually refused; even then she was meek and shy, not really wanting to fight. 

Erythis and Vendrida used to get along, usually, better than Danny and Ward did. Danny still remembered one Christmas that Erythis had spent as a small bat clinging to Vendrida's back (Vendrida usually liking to be some kind of medium-sized dog then; she'd settled much smaller). It had never struck him as odd at the time -- Erythis and Ward were always a little odd -- but he frowned, now, thinking about it: all weekend long, the way Ward's daemon had clung to _his_ daemon because she seemed to be frightened of Duchess and Harold, and possibly not that sure about Ward ...

"Anyway," Joy said, taking a sip of her wine, "it doesn't suit his image to have a small, shy daemon, I think. That shark-in-the-boardroom image he wants to project. I think he'd like our investors to think she's a tiny poisonous snake tucked up his sleeve, or a jumping spider or something. If they can't see her, they're always looking over their shoulders trying to figure out where she is."

"But she _is_ with him."

"Danny," Joy said, giving him a peculiar look. "Are you feeling all right? Of course she's with him, where else would she be?"


	2. Ward

Ward couldn't hear her voice anymore, not after all these years. Couldn't tell where she was, or how far. But he knew she was alive. Maybe these days, Erythis -- wherever his father had put her -- was the only part of his soul that _was_ alive.

"I need them for pain," he told Joy, anger flaring when she pulled open the drawer full of bottles of pills with that look of disgust in her eyes, but he couldn't tell her what the pain was really from.

 

***

 

"Where _is_ she?" he snarled, as the knife slid into his father's (un)living flesh: blood on both of them, binding them together in death just as in life. His father gasped out his last breaths against Ward's shoulder, while Ward shook him and screamed, "What did you _do_ with her?"

But there were no answers, and they sank down to the floor together in a spreading pool of blood.

Ward sat beside his father's cooling corpse, breathing slow and regulated breaths as the pain of separation from Erythis pulsed through his veins with nothing to dull it. His last chance at getting her back, and he'd lost control, he hadn't _thought,_ he should have asked questions, he should have ...

_And you think he'd have given you answers?_

He had feared and loathed Duchess, Harold's daemon, particularly for Duchess's brutality towards Erythis, the way she used to hold Erythis in her jaws until Ward's daemon went limp with fear, and Ward along with her. But Harold with Duchess would never have done a thing like this. When Harold had come back without Duchess, he'd come back ... wrong. He'd come back as a man who would pick up someone else's daemon and pull them away until all Ward could do was scream in pain.

And now Erythis was somewhere beyond his reach, somewhere Ward would never find her.

She wasn't going to die, Ward told himself. Daemons didn't need to eat or drink. Wherever his father had put her, whatever means he'd found to stop her from finding her way back to Ward, she was in no more danger with Harold dead than when he was alive.

And he could find her.

He could do this.

 

***

 

There were too many places to look, too much else happening, and when Harold did come back, when Ward finally realized the trap he was in (the trap that had closed around him the moment Harold's hands closed on Erythis) he couldn't see any point in fighting anymore. The sting of heroin slipping into his veins was a relief, the only kind he had these days.

He just hoped, wherever she was, that Erythis got some relief from it too.


	3. Danny

"You destroyed everything!" Danny called down from the catwalk, with Vendrida pattering along at his side as he ducked behind a girder to conceal himself from Harold and the gun. "My family! Your family!"

Vendrida looked up at him and whined, as if to say, Now? Danny put his trembling hand on her head, blood seeping into her golden fur. He couldn't risk it; he didn't know what Harold was capable of, or how vulnerable she was. He had to take on this fight himself. He didn't dare risk her in it.

"All I wanted was to have my family beside me," Howard shouted back. "You turned them against me. Now vengeance is the only thing I'm interested in."

Out of the dark, they came together, fist colliding with skin and bone, knocking the gun across the roof. Vendrida, snarling, retreated and paced alongside as they struggled. And Harold, daemonless, fought alone and only seemed stronger for it.

"Without the Fist, you're just another screwed-up little kid," Harold sneered, and his knuckles pasted Danny across the cheekbone, knocking him down. He reached for a length of metal pipe, driving Danny down with repeated blows. When Vendrida lunged at him, he knocked her away with a single blow. She yelped and tumbled across the roof.

"What's the matter? No Iron Fist to save you?" Harold swung the pipe at Danny's head. Danny caught it, but he was flung onto his back. Harold stood above him and planted a boot in his chest. "You fool. You don't even know when you've lost."

Danny grinned up at him with bloody lips.

"What the hell are you smiling about?" Harold demanded, and then something the size of a buffalo came out of nowhere and sent him sprawling across the roof before pouncing on him.

Golden fur floated around it like a halo -- and it _was_ glowing, not just backlit by the roof lights. It was growling like the roar of a diesel locomotive, a Pekingese the size of a horse, her deep chest heaving with her breaths.

"Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that?" Danny asked, picking himself up and wiping away the blood smeared across his cheek. "Vendrida didn't settle as a dog. She's a fu-dog."

It had taken him awhile to stop expecting it to hurt him when Vendrida used her fu-dog form to attack people. But it didn't, no matter who she touched as a fu-dog, no matter who touched her. She couldn't hold that shape for long, but it was for her like the Iron Fist was for Danny, and he felt her energy, her chi, flowing back into him. She was powerful, she was invincible, she would bite this person who dared threaten her Danny and then --

\-- and then Harold sank his hands into the thick golden fur of her sides, and there was pain.

Danny doubled over with a scream. It wasn't supposed to work like this. Vendrida, as a fu-dog, wasn't vulnerable to others in the same way as a normal daemon. And anyway, no one touched someone else's daemon, no one ...

But Harold, with no daemon of his own -- Harold, who had left his soul behind in his grave -- Harold gripped her and Vendrida howled, writhing, her massive fu-dog shape collapsing into the tiny Pekingese. Even in her small body, she still had the soul of a lion and she struggled weakly, trying to bite with what little strength she had, even as Danny clawed desperately at the roof tiles and fought to find the strength to sit up. There was no torture in the world like the feeling of someone else touching your daemon against your will. It was as if someone had reached down into the core of him and ripped his internal organs out.

Danny managed to raise his head, panting, to see Harold wrap his fingers around Vendrida's throat, his other hand gripping the Peke's body hard enough that her ribs creaked.

"No," Danny croaked out. He couldn't center himself, couldn't draw on his chi. Harold was going to snap Vendrida's neck in front of him, and there was nothing he could do.

And then a kestrel dived out of the sky, raking at Harold's eyes.

The instant of contact made the bird wobble in its flight, and Danny dimly heard Colleen cry out in pain, but as Harold turned in that moment of distraction, there was the quick snap of gunshots, three of them in close succession. Harold staggered backward, dropping Vendrida. Another shot ... Danny stared, dazedly, at Ward squeezing the trigger, and watching through a haze of pain as Ward's father tipped over the roof and plunged to the street far below.

"Danny," Colleen was saying, " _Danny,_ " and he looked up dazedly at Colleen kneeling to take him in her arms.

"I ... I'm all right." He wasn't really, he thought he might never be, not with that _terrible-bad-wrong_ feeling as if someone else's hands, _Harold's_ hands, were pawing around at his insides, tearing things apart. But he was starting to pull himself back together. Vendrida picked herself up and limped back to collapse at his side, and as he put an arm around her and pulled her close, relaxing into Colleen's lap, he began to feel as if things were starting to be okay.

Mabushī fluttered down to land in his usual place on Colleen's shoulder. She reached up absently to rub at his feathers.

Which made Danny think of what Ward didn't have, and he looked past Colleen at his ... brother, or something like it, who had slumped down to sit with his back against the wall, head resting in his hands.

"Thanks," Danny said.

Ward grunted acknowledgement, but didn't raise his head.

 

***

 

It was at the crematorium, before Jeri and her sleek black jackal paced into the room, that Danny finally found the nerve to ask the question he never had asked Ward. With his hand buried deep in Vendrida's thick golden fur to give him strength, he asked, "Ward, where's Erythis? You aren't like ..." and his voice trailed off, not sure if he wanted to finish that sentence.

"Like him?" Ward finished for him, nodding to the coffin being loaded into the oven. "No. I'm not. She's alive. She's just ..." He took a breath, and Danny saw that his hands were trembling slightly, plucking at the hem of his suit jacket. "Not here."

"Where?" Danny asked softly.

"I don't know. Dad took her, when he came back the first time. I --" Ward looked away, speaking to the wall, not to Danny. "I ... passed out, when he took her. When I woke up, she wasn't there. I couldn't help her."

For a moment all Danny could remember was the _awfulbadwrong_ of Harold grasping Vendrida, the Pekingese's weak struggles and their shared agony. Vendrida remembered too, and she whined softly, pressing closer to Danny's leg.

And then he thought about what Ward had said, _When he came back the first time ..._

"How old were you?"

"Eighteen," Ward said. He glanced over, at Danny with his hand buried in Vendrida's fur, and away again.

"I thought a person couldn't ..." Danny tried to grasp at the words to say what he meant. In K'un Lun, the monks had tested his ability to be separated from Vendrida. They'd trained him at it; they said it was something he needed to know how to do. And it had hurt more than the beatings, more than pulled and torn muscles -- more than anything else except Harold with Vendrida on the rooftop yesterday.

Twelve years. Twelve years, to be separated from one's daemon.

"I know," Ward said shortly. "They say you can't. Actually, come to find out, you can. I mean, up to a point." His words were clipped. "She must not be that far away, I guess. But I never could find her. And ... you sort of stop noticing it, at least quite as much. After a while."

"Ward," Danny said, alarmed. He turned toward the crematorium's oven. They hadn't turned it on. Not yet. There was still time to stop this. "Ward, we can't --"

"We have to." His voice was weary. "Look, I thought that before. I killed him once already, and when he came back I thought, well, now maybe I can find out ... But he'd rather die for real than give up that leverage over me. And he's too dangerous to risk it. Much too dangerous."

There was the click of claws that heralded the arrival of Jeri's jackal, jet-black and ears pricked, looking like an avatar of Anubis himself.

"Ward," Danny said, very quietly. Vendrida whined, but for a different reason, this time. "Are you _sure?"_

"I'm sure," Ward said, turning away. "I just want him gone. I can find her on my own. I have a lifetime to try, and not much else to do with it." 

 

***

 

The floor of the dojo was covered with papers. Ward picked his way through them, toward where Danny and Colleen (and their daemons) were sitting with loosely organized stacks around them.

"Ward! Hey!" Danny gestured. "You got my texts! You're checking my texts! There's pizza. And, um, about a million files. Pick a pile."

"What the heck is all this?" Ward asked, reaching for a file at random. It was a lease with one of Rand's shell corporations as the leasee. He stared at it in blank, dazed bafflement.

"We're looking for a place where your father might have hidden your daemon," Colleen said quietly, and smiled at Ward's shocked look. She swept a stack of paperwork aside with her bare toes. "Sit down. Have a slice of pizza. Help us."

On her shoulder, Mabushī ruffled his feathers and tucked his head under his wing.

"What," Ward said. He looked at the piece of paper in his hand, and then down at them. "Why are you -- doing this? I thought you wanted to leave town."

Danny sighed, smiled, and kicked at Ward's ankle, not quite close enough to make actual contact. "You gave up your chance at getting Erythis back to save me. I have places I have to go, things I have to do, but before that, the least we can do is help you find her again. You don't have to do it alone."

Ward just looked at him.

"Since you're up," Colleen asked brightly, "could you make us some tea, please? There's a hot plate against the wall, and a kettle."

Ward turned numbly in that direction. "Got coffee?" he asked over his shoulder.

"Instant?" Danny said. "I think?"

"Oh my God."

They spent the afternoon like that, ordering in (Ward found a place that would deliver coffee), and looking through endless lists of Rand holdings, sorting them into more and less likely. After awhile, Vendrida, who had been sprawled sleepily by Danny's ankle, got up and went over to curl up by Ward -- not touching him, just nearby.

 

***

 

Of the places they found, the places they looked at, there was an abandoned farmhouse up the Hudson Valley, anomalous enough among the Rand holdings to raise some flags.

They'd already checked out some of the other, closer places. The problem was that Rand's holdings were vast and diverse, and this one prompted a fight because it was miles away from the city, too far for anyone to be separated from their daemon, let alone on a permanent basis. It shouldn't have been possible. But then again, Danny thought, he wasn't sure what was possible if you systematically removed someone farther and farther from their daemon over the course of years, without the moral sense to worry about what happened to either of them.

And there was no reason why Rand should own a farm that hadn't been in operation since 1993.

It looked abandoned when they drove in. Winter-dead branches rattled in the wind when they stepped out of the car, and Mabushī clung to Colleen, ruffling his feathers and turning his head into her neck. "This isn't a good place," he said quietly, and Vendrida's soft growl said the same.

But Ward just looked around with wide, distant eyes, and Danny and Colleen exchanged a look.

The buildings on the property were mere wreckage, but a barn was still intact, with a stairwell leading down to an oddly intact basement. Danny's groping fingers found a light switch, which he didn't expect to work, but apparently the place still had utilities because lights flickered on all across a large, concrete-floored basement. 

There were rows of cages here, in this dark, mold-smelling place. All of them were, at the moment, standing open except for one. 

That one, only dimly glimpsed in the shadows in the back of the room, was closed and locked. It contained nothing except a moldering jacket (one of Ward's old jackets, Danny would later learn), and a water bowl long since dried to dust.

And something brown and furry, curled up in the nest of the jacket.

Ward staggered and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Colleen, coming down behind him, nearly ran into him. 

Danny didn't hesitate. He'd never found the Fist so easy to channel. With one punch, he knocked the lock off the cage.

There was a faint stirring from within. The creature inside writhed, as if waking up from a deep drowsing state. Pieces of the rotted jacket fell apart around it as it uncoiled, and in the dim light its eyes glittered as it raised a sleek, mustelid head.

And then there was a shock of motion, and a slim brown streak lunged from the cage (triggering a screech of alarm from Colleen's Mabushī) and pounced on Ward, who fell backwards, hitting the floor hard on his tailbone. He didn't seem to care. The darting streak of his daemon writhed all over him in joy, and he just looked stunned and ecstatic.

It took awhile for Erythis to calm down enough that Danny could see she'd settled as some kind of small brown weasel-like animal -- not actually the tiny, shy rodent that Joy had thought, but a small carnivore, clinging to Ward's chest with her sharp claws.

"You came," she said, rubbing her face on his, while Ward cradled her as if he couldn't quite believe she was real. "You came, you came, you _came."_

Colleen had averted her eyes, while Mabushī, on her shoulder as usual, tucked his head under her hair. This sort of scene between a person and their daemon was private, about as private as anything could be. But Danny couldn't bring himself to tear his eyes away, because he'd never seen Ward like this: open, happy, _young._

He'd never seen Ward with both halves of his soul. Not in fifteen years. And, in some sense, maybe not even then.

"I'm sorry," Ward was saying, "I'm sorry, I'm so so _so_ sorry," and Erythis kissed him all over with her little pointed weasel-face and said, "It's okay, it's okay, you're here now."

"It's not that I'm sorry for," he said, pulling her head into the crook of his shoulder, and that was the point when Danny really _did_ want to look away, especially when Erythis said quietly, "I know. I know _you,_ remember? We were kids. It wasn't our fault, nothing he did to us was our fault."

Danny took a step back and knocked into one of the cages.

Erythis raised her small head and looked around. "You found us," she said, and while Danny wasn't quite sure what to do, Vendrida trotted forward as if at an invitation, tail wagging tentatively. The fu-dog and the little mustelid (fisher? Danny thought) touched noses, and Danny crouched down on the basement floor as Vendrida lay down beside the newly reunited pair -- not touching Ward, of course, but close. Very close. About as close as she could get. Ward propped himself up on one elbow, grinning shakily and helplessly; he looked up at Danny and traded a tentative grin, as Erythis wound around his arm and twisted her head around to rub on the Pekingese who had been her friend so long ago.

"He saved us too," Vendrida said, and darted out a little pink tongue to lick the fisher's nose. "We should help you now. It is only right, sister."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fu-dogs in this story are adapted from the way Barbara Hambly writes them in _Bride of the Rat God,_ because I really enjoyed that version.
> 
> It occurred to me while I was thinking about daemons in this universe that you really couldn't ask for a better metaphor for the way Ward behaves in season one towards Danny vs. season two, because he really does act like Danny gave him back half his soul.


End file.
